No Interest

I've lost interest in reading this week. Everything I pick up seems pointless and boring. Last night I was bereft so I walked over to my bookcase hoping that something would entice me. My eye fell upon a P.D. James mystery and I immediately knew that is what my heart wanted. I've been missing my British mysteries! So I started A Taste for Death last night and reading is a pleasure again.

Is this Realistic?

It seems the books I have been reading lately have a common element: what I call "the Helen of Troy" character. A woman of gifts, beauty and spunk. The further commonality that makes her a Helen is that not all men are attracted to her. Some hate her, some fear her, some are indifferent. But the men who are attracted to her are invariably powerful, intelligent, and charismatic. And they are not just attracted to her, they're practically obsessed with her. Is this pure fiction? Or is this a phenomenon that a simple, homely girl such as myself just can't equate to anything in my personal experience? I don't know. What do you guys think?

Fantasy Land

At work, the next genre we're discussing (in May) is fantasy. So, I'm reading a few fantasy novels right now: Tithe by Holly Black, The Blue Girl by Charles De Lint and A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Now, I am not normally a fantasy reader so this is a departure for me, but I'm really enjoying each novel and am glad that I'm forced to read different genres.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

This is a very funny, sweet and slightly sad tome on aging. I really enjoyed it. With essays on everything from body maintenance to apartment love to JFK, it is really endearing and amusing. Just don't read the final essay before going to bed. It is about death and was painful and terrifying to read. I couldn't sleep and when I did I had nightmares because it truly makes you think about death seriously. But it is mostly hilarious and entertaining and if death scares you just skip the final essay!

Something New

Well, good things can come even from a terrible gothic novel. At the end of my book there was an excerpt from a novel called Dead to the World. I read it and was interested. It turns out it was the fourth book in a vampire series by Charlaine Harris. I read an entire book yesterday. It is the strangest mix of genres I have ever seen. It's like sci-fi/romance/mystery. I had to look in like every section of the library until I finally found it in mystery. It's like the vampire part of it is more part of the setting than the main subject, which is really a mystery about women being murdered in a small Louisiana town. It's set in a world where vampires have "come out of the coffin" as they put it in the book and revealed their existence to the world because a synthetic blood has been invented so they no longer have to feed on humans (they still do, though). Anyway, interesting main character who is not a vampire, only telepathic, colorful characters throughout, AND they were written by a hugely fat Southern woman, and that just makes me feel good! It's called the Sookie Stackhouse series if you're interested. I think Niesa would really like them.

Sofie Metropolis by Tori Carrington

I read this mystery as part of the genre study we are doing at work. We had to read a type of mystery that we normally don't read. I never read P.I. novels and this one looked okay. Sofie Metropolis is from a large Greek family in Queens and has inadvertently started working for her Uncle Spyros' detective agency. She gets caught up in a mob-related, cheating spouse, murder case and in finding the missing dog of her mother's friend Mrs. K. The mystery really only takes up about 30% of this novel. The rest is concerned with Sofie's family and her love life. I enjoyed it, but I prefer more of a mystery and something a bit darker.